Angela

By Annaleese Jochems.

When Herbert the handyman came to look at Angela’s doorknob she was at the stove, stirring a white sauce, and flipping five vege patties. He looked at the knob briefly, then sat down on her Lazyboy and stayed there for an hour. 

Angela talked, he listened. She made him several weak coffees, and when she noticed the time after handing over the third she got a fright. 

‘Do you charge by the hour?’ 

‘Haven’t done any work yet.’ 

That was true. It humiliated her, how much she liked talking to this short, dumpy man while he sat, and she moved around him, spraying and wiping, sweeping and dusting. He was a brilliant listener; the most passive person she’d ever spoken to. It took him about ten minutes to fix the knob, and he asked to be paid in cash. 

After he left Angela had a minor mental breakdown. The white sauce had burnt while she talked to Herbert. Then there were problems with her IBS. She was in the bathroom when he came back in through the back door, asking if she was alright. ‘Yes!’ she yelled from the bathroom. ‘Certainly!’ 

‘Knobs loose again, I’ll have another fiddle with it for free.’ 

Back in the kitchen, she scraped the pot while he messed with it. 

‘What’s the problem?’ he said, finally. 

‘I’m crying because of you!’ 

He looked confused, but patient. As if he didn’t need to understand anything in a hurry, or at all. He didn’t ask what he’d done, just gave the door knob a final pat, and sat back down in the lazy boy. He said, ‘Okay.’ 

Angela said, ‘I work all the time, on so many different projects, and you come in and sit in my chair, my best chair, the chair I never sit in.’ She sat down on the hard on the couch, right into its bones. 

Herbert looked like he might stand up, but didn’t. Angela heaved with tears. He said, ‘Maybe have a lie-down?’ 

‘I’m always lying down, because I’m always so stressed. Don’t you see that that’s just another thing I have to do? Don’t you see that you, and people like you are always making me do things?’

Herbert looked around the room, and didn’t see it. ‘Maybe lie down, for quite a while?’

‘You’re right! The only way out is death!’ 

Herbert waited. 

‘I’m a property manager,’ she said, finally. ‘I find the tenants, then I go around every now and again and check they’re cleaning up after themselves. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it?’ 

‘Uh.’ 

‘But it is! They’re all hovels, every single house. The only people who’ll live in them are animals! 

‘Hm.’ He listened to her. Before he left the second time, she made him check the door knob, and fix it again. The next day it was still wobbly, and worse, Angela felt violated. What had he done, to make her reveal so much? She gave him a bad google review, and resolved never to see him again. 

The next Saturday – Saturday was her only real day off – she opened an email. It was from a tenant, and could wait, but she flew into a rage. Mostly at herself for even looking at her phone when she already had so much to do ,but also – it just came from nowhere. She lifted her leg above her hip, and with the support of her hands under her thigh, thrust it forward and kicked the food scraps bin directly through the kitchen window. For days afterwards there were little bits of food rotting everywhere, sticking too her shoes, and to the lips of the drawers. She didn’t want to call any of the decent trades people in the area and talk to them about it, and so, with teeth gritted, she called Herbert. He didn’t have much to say to her story about a deranged bird, although in a way it was the truth. 

He put a board over the window, while she rearranged her Tupperware. She had a problem with tasks, she tried to explain to him. She was always doing them. It was the only way she could relax. If she wasn’t doing a task, she’d be thinking about every task she might be doing, which was more arduous than actually doing one, or even three of them. He said, ‘Hmm, hard to relate to.’ 

She looked at a lumpy vegetable stock on the stove, gyrating on the boil, then at his potato-ish face. After a while letting her look, Herbert looked back. He said, ‘Hey beautiful.’ 

Angela just stood there, unsure whether or not she was offended, but filled already with a sense of how much she knew that he didn’t. She wiped her mouth, although there was no moisture there. 

She said, ‘Don’t you have another job to get to?’ 

He shook his head. ‘Only calls I take are yours.’ 

Herbert the layabout. The hairy thick-thighed sloth. He set himself up on the couch, in a sleeping bag that slipped and revealed him during the night. Angela’s friends begged her to make him leave, and actually laughed at her. But for the first time she could remember, she was enjoying life. He made slow cooker puddings, which they ate together until Angela got nauseous. Then he’d put them in the fridge in enormous tups, and after a while tip them out behind a bush in the garden. He sat on the couch, supporting her while she powered away on her exercise bike, and was very compassionate when she had to stop suddenly, and make her way thunderously to the bathroom. 

Angela was absorbed into the same dreamy sleep he lived in, and they floated, passive and together, like two things in a broth. He was always warm to the touch, rosy in the cheeks. She began to see his beauty, and enjoy his roundness, and stopped spending as much time on her exercise bike. Food sat in her better, cushioned by her new contentment. She felt fed in a way she hadn’t for years. Maybe her problem had always been hunger. She felt herself softening in warm, constant feelings and thought, what is it they say about lobsters in pots? 

He came with her sometimes on property inspections. If things weren’t so bad in a house he’d reach up with his big pink fingers and brush cobwebs away, or wipe a smear from a wall with the sleeve of his sweater, so that Angela could tick every box on her inspection form, and wouldn’t have to come back later to check that anything had been done.    

He was her main problem now, and completely unsolvable. In some way she thought, smugly, she had caused him. He’d arrived from nowhere, or - like the mysterious product of a split atom - from the frantic heat of her own body. Not that Angela had ever been very sexual. There was too much trouble with her IBS - particularly with a special structured pant she liked to wear on her days off. Also, she didn’t find anyone very attractive. No, Herbert had been born like Jesus, from the honest and pure nothing of her desire; and just like Jesus had for Mary, he’d come into the world as an acknowledgement that Angela was such a woman, so much better than everyone else, and so good at multi-tasking. 

Was Herbert happy? He seemed it. He liked to ask her lazy questions, philosophical puzzles of his own devising: Would she like him better if he was black? A king? Would she stay with him if he lost everything?

‘Herbert,’ She said. ‘You don’t have anything to lose.’ But he didn’t mind, just smiled and tapped her on the bum, walking past on his way to the kitchen. She liked that; liked his easy smile, and the warm cushioned feel of his palm. It was nice to think that by doing nothing, just by being around, she could make him happy. Although tubby, he never seemed heavy. His contentment lifted her. 

Except that one day he grabbed rather than tapping, and said, ‘What about having some fun?’ 

‘What do you mean?’ Her stomach lurched. His smile was rakish, merry – his eyes deep brown and electric. She felt an imminent flare-up. 

He shrugged, smiled: ‘A trip to the zoo.’ 

They went, and everything was as Angela expected. He got an ice-cream and she licked it. At the monkeys he touched her hair interestedly, like a bonobo. She felt tickled and a little toddlerish; Herbert was taller than her by a head.

But, right at the back of the zoo a sun bear sat alone in a little hut, surrounded by an eeiry, empty, concrete moat. Looking at the bear, Angela actually started to cry. Herbert said it was just the strange, wet black skin under her eyes that made the bear look so sad, but Angela couldn’t be sure. Actually, what he said really annoyed her: How could you expect her to be happy?? Shut up in there, in such an ugly hut, and shut up again inside such a slow, obese body, opening her mouth all day long and shoving slow, effortful handfuls of grass in, chewing. Angela’s IBS had been good that day, but annoyance was a trigger, and when she touched her stomach, she felt an answering tremor. 

Herbert said, ‘Come here,’ and basically dragged her around the side of the cage to where the grass was long and you could look down at the sludge in the moat. ‘I used to come here as a teen,’ he pointed down at the long grass, jumping with bugs. ‘And fuck.’ 

Angela was filled with a kind of distanced fear, like you feel in some dreams. She felt the sharp button of her trousers, turned sideways and digging into the cheese-flesh of her stomach, and said nothing. 

The bear moaned. Now, from where they were, they looked up at the back of her head. Angela thought her hair was thinning. 

‘How are you feeling?’ Herbert asked, and flicked that back of his fingers lightly against her belly. She’d never noticed his eyebrows before. They were dark with imminent power. 

‘Fine,’ she said. They both heard the noise. Angela recognised it from once before, years ago, at a devastating work meeting. 

He laughed. ‘Want to, or nah?’ 

She thought, was there a stink or was that just the bear moat. While she thought, Herbert pounced on her, so that she fell back into the thick, rough grass. She thought, there is a stink, I have shit myself. A lock of hair fell over his eyes. He tossed his head, smiled. She also thought, yes, I want to.

Herbert saw the look in her eyes, the fear, horror, shame, and the desire. He grinned. ‘Guess there’s nothing left to worry about then.’ 

She felt his cock bulge. She heard the bear moan to itself, but forgot its sadness. It’s hard to describe what happened then, except that Angela had a sort of vison. She knew that if she accepted Herbert inside her, imperfect as he was, she could accept everything that was already inside her – her own imperfect self. She needed him. 

Although erect, he wasn’t hard in the stereotypical way. Maybe none of them are. It felt more like when you put a lot of food in your mouth – too much food, you realise too late – and there’s a moment of panic before you chew it, as if chewing may be impossible.

Angela didn’t feel any kind of overwhelming sensation, which was just as well – it wouldn’t have been any different from how she felt the rest of the time anyway. Instead she felt like a muffin resting after baking. She felt herself becoming independent and complete – finding self-possession. 

While she found hers, Herbert must have lost his. He relaxed into her, the way a calm afternoon falls into an evening storm. When Angela blinked her eyes open, he was gone. Maybe she’d destroyed him, but that was never how she thought of it. She believed instead that in her, he’d found a purpose – something that finally impelled him to action, and that having completed this action it was natural for him to disappear. 

Sex can be a kind of wakeful sleeping, and in her dream she’d seen him, a hairy man in a straw cap – perhaps Jesus – disappearing over a hill and out of the world. Maybe the purpose of Jesus was to give everyone else someone to feel better than and by doing so, humble us. Some men are like bread – fluffy things that you can eat. 

She picked up his floppy cap – all that was left of him – and headed home. The sun bear was not sad, she thought then, just resting. Angela felt restful too, and complete. It was only when she was halfway home that she remembered what’d happened before what’d happened. But she walked calmly.